Barcelona 2020: Visual chronicle of a confined city

By Jordi Panyella

The fact that a journalist of the written press, an editor for more than thirty years, suddenly starts writing with pictures, taking photos, can only mean two things: either he is gone mad or the world has been so reversed that it is not recognizable anymore.
Jordi Panyella (Barcelona, 1966) is still writing in the newspaper El Punt Avui, as he always has, but the world has now changed radically. And specially in his city, following the brutal impact of the crisis of the Covid-19. 
Through a story woven with images taken during two months of confinement, Barcelona 2020 unfolds the every day life in the city, this wonderful city, its streets and its people during a unique spring, empty of life, full of fear and horror, struggles and hope.
It is the visual chronicle of a historic event that will determine a whole generation. It is a unique story, full of emotions, the graphic testimony of unrepeatable days.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edicions Saldonar
• Release date: Jun 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9788417611385

Book preview

Dedication

If your eyes see it,

it’s true, it has been true.

To words, so they always honor

the memory of those who are not among us anymore.

Visual chronicle of a resilient city

Ada Colau Ballano

Mayor of Barcelona

Umberto Eco said that the mission of creators is to establish a new order: Some say the world is repetitive, and others that it is always surprising and different. The visual chronicle that you have in your hands is an artifact of personal memory, which over the years will become an artifact of collective memory.

This photographic diary of Jordi Panyella documents our confined city and seeks the surprising and distinct where most only see a lack of movement. You will find not only a registration of empty streets, closed shops, and messages of hope, but also the living memory of this Spring of 2020, when the city and the world stopped.

This confinement and its challenges are not the first setback faced by the city, which has managed to recover from complicated situations before: fascist bombings, hunger and misery during the war, and more recently the collapse of a tunnel in El Carmel and the terrorist attacks in La Rambla.

The resilience capacity of this city is the resilience capacity of its people, who even in the worst moments goes ahead and always puts their eye on the future. In this sense, the Covid-19 has taken many things from us, and certainly the most painful one was being unable to say goodbye to our departed neighbors, families and friends who have died during this period.

But we were also given the opportunity to stop and slow down. To reflect on everything that does not work, everything that we want better. Now that Barcelona, and slowly the world too, open to new life, the responsibility is ours: we must live up to these lessons we learned, we must give the best of us, we must accelerate the changes that will make this transformation possible, and we must do